Perhaps the most interesting, though neither the most startling nor seductive, of this batch is Segonzac. Like all the best things in nature, he matures slowly and gets a little riper every day; so, as he is already a thoroughly good painter, like the nigger of Saint-Cyr he has but to continue. Before nature, or rather cultivation, with its chocolate ploughed fields and bright green trees, as before the sumptuous splendours of a naked body, his reaction is manifestly, flatteringly, lyrical. He might have been a bucolic rhapsodist had not his sensibility been well under the control of as sound a head as you would expect to find on the shoulders of a gentleman of Gascony. His emotions are kept severely in their place by rigorous concentration on the art of painting. Nevertheless, there are critics who complain that his compositions still tend to lack organization and his forms definition. And perhaps they do sometimes: only in these, as in other respects, his art improves steadily.[F]
Footnote F:[ (return) ] Salon d'automne, 1921: It has again made a big stride forward. Segonzac is now amongst the best painters in France.
"Sa peinture a une petite côté vicieuse qui est adorable"—I have heard the phrase so often that I can but repeat it. Marie Laurencin's painting is adorable; we can never like her enough for liking her own femininity so well, and for showing all her charming talent instead of smothering it in an effort to paint like a man; but she is not a great artist—she is not even the best woman painter alive. She is barely as good as Dufy (a contemporary of Picasso unless I mistake, but for many years known rather as a decorator and illustrator than a painter in oils) who, while he confined himself to designing for the upholsterers and making "images," was very good indeed. His oil-paintings are another matter. Dufy has a formula for making pictures; he has a cliché for a tree, a house, a chimney, even for the smoke coming out of a chimney. In this way he can be sure of producing a pretty article, and, what is more, an article the public likes.
Very different is the art of Kisling. Rarely does he produce one of those pictures so appetizing that one fancies they must be good to eat. What you will find in his work, besides much good painting, is a serious preoccupation with the problem of externalizing in form an æsthetic experience. And as, after all, that is the proper end of art his work is treated with respect by all the best painters and most understanding critics, though it has not yet scored a popular success. "Kisling ne triche pas," says André Salmon.
The war did not kill the movement: none but a fool could have supposed that it would. Nevertheless, it had one ghastly effect on contemporary painting. When I returned to Paris in the autumn of 1919 I found the painters whom I had known before the war developing, more or less normally, and producing work which fell nowise short of what one had come to expect. I saw all that there was to be seen; I admired; and then I asked one who had already, before the war, established a style and a reputation—I asked Friesz, I think—"Et les jeunes?" "Nous sommes les jeunes" was the reply. Those young French painters who should have been emerging from the ruck of students between 1914 and 1919 had either been killed, or deflected from their career, or gravely retarded. Only now is la jeunesse beginning to give signs of vitality; only now is a new crop coming to the surface; so now I will take the foolhardy risk of pronouncing the names of a few who seem to me to have given proof of undeniable talent—Gabriel-Fournier, Favory, Lotiron, Soutine, Corneau, Durey, Monzain, Richard, Guindet, Togores, Gromaire, Alix, Halicka. I must not be taken to assert that all of these are under thirty, or that none was known to discerning amateurs before the war, or in its first years at any rate. Certainly, the work of Gabriel-Fournier, Favory, Soutine, and I think of Corneau, was known to me even, through photographs, before the Armistice was signed. As certainly I think it is true that all are of a later crop than Segonzac, Marie Laurencin, Luc-Albert Moreau, etc., while Monzain, Richard, Togores, Gromaire, Alix, Guindet, and Halicka are very young indeed. So here are a dozen painters—most of them little known at present outside a smallish circle of artists, critics, and inquisitive amateurs—who appear to give promise of excellence: amongst them I should be inclined to look for the masters of a coming age.[G]
Footnote G:[ (return) ] Twelve years ago I made a list of young or youngish painters—the men of thirty or thereabouts—from whom it seemed to me reasonable to expect great things. It included such names as Derain, Picasso, Vlaminck, Marchand, Friesz, Maillol, Duncan Grant: one need not be laudator temporis acti to feel that the men of the new generation are on a smaller scale. This merely confirms my often expressed notion that the decade 1875-85 produced a prodigious quantity of greatly gifted babies. On the other hand, if by comparison with the salon d'automne of 1911 that of '2l seems unexciting, we must not fail to do justice to the extraordinarily high level of painting that has now been attained. And this confirms another of my pet theories—that we live in an age comparable (so far as painting goes) with the quattro cento. The works of even the smallest artists of that age enchant us now, because in that age any man of any talent could make a picture; but doubtless at the time critics and amateurs sighed for the first thrilling years of the movement—for the discoveries of Masaccio and Donatello—and were quite ready to welcome the novelties of the high renaissance when they came. The world moves faster nowadays; already we look regretfully back to the days when Matisse and Picasso were launching the movement, and another high renaissance may be nearer than we suppose.
To this list I would add, in no spirit of paradox, two names which, at first sight, must appear singularly out of place—Camoin and Guérin. Both were at work before the contemporary movement—the Cézanne movement—was born or, at any rate, launched; both for a long time seemed to be, if anything, opposed to it; both for some years lay dormant in a chrysalis-like state to emerge recently a pair of very interesting painters. The Camoin and the Guérin with whom I am concerned appeared since the war; they may, of course, relapse into their former condition: time will show. Apparently it was only three or four years ago that Camoin realized that Matisse—his contemporary—was the master from whom he could draw that nourishment which one good artist may very legitimately draw from another. So nourished, he seems to have made a fresh start; at any rate his work has now a freshness and vivacity which in his younger days he could never impart. The case of Guérin is odder still. A passionate admirer of Watteau, he would seem to have locked himself up in a rather sterile devotion to the eighteenth century master. One must suppose that there was something dead in his appreciation, something recognized but unfelt, and therefore not really understood. This deadness came through into his work. Lacking genuine inspiration, struggling in consequence to impart life by tricks and conventions, he occasionally allowed himself to tumble into downright vulgarity. Suddenly, and without renouncing any ancient loyalty, he has come to life. It is Watteau that inspires him still; but the essential Watteau—Watteau the painter—not that superficies which is more or less familiar to every hack, be he limner or penman, who dabbles in the eighteenth century. How amusing to fancy that the just admiration now felt for the genius of Watteau by those descendants of Cézanne who formerly misesteemed it has somehow put Guérin himself in the way of becoming intimate with an art he had formerly worshipped at a distance!
Though the war did not kill or even cripple the movement, since the war there has been a change, or, at any rate, a change has become apparent. To begin with, Picasso has, in a sense, retired from public life—from the life of the cafés and studios I mean—and in isolation works out those problems that are for ever presenting themselves to his restless brain. The splendid fruit of his solitude we saw last summer chez Paul Rosenberg. From time to time Picasso still paints a Cubist picture—to keep his mind in—but he is hardly to be reckoned a Cubist, and certainly not a pure one. Of that school, which still flourishes (exhibiting at la Section d'Or or rue de la Baume the work of Braque, Gleizes, Léger, Metzinger, Gris, Laurens, Lipsitz, Marcoussis, Henry Hayden, and the brilliant Irène Lagut), Picasso is the inspiration, perhaps, but not the chief. His influence in the western world and on foreign painters in Paris is as great as ever; but the French, slightly vexed, maybe, at having accepted so long the leadership of a Spaniard, show signs of turning back towards their national tradition. So, though Picasso remains the animator of the doctrinaire school or schools, Lhote may become the master. It is the fashion, I know, not to take his influence seriously. No matter how clever a man he may be, Lhote—they say—is not a big enough painter to be a chief. It may be so—I suspect it is—yet we should not forget that, besides being intelligent and capable of drawing more or less plausible inferences from premises of his own choosing, Lhote can point to a practice by no means despicable. For the rest, he is the apostle of logic and discipline, and so finds plenty to approve in the Cubist doctrine and the French tradition from Poussin to David. I do not know whether Bissière is to be ranked amongst his disciples—I should think not—but Bissière, a most attractive artist, is perhaps significant of the new tendency in that he has chosen to express a whimsical temperament in terms of prim science. About the science of picture-making, as the director of the National Gallery calls it, he has little to learn. He knows the masters, the Primitives especially, and has a way, at once logical and fantastic, of playing on their motifs which gives sometimes the happiest results. Bissière is too fanciful and odd ever to be a chef d'école or representative even; but the very fact that, being what he is, he has chosen such means of expression is symptomatic.
So the doctrinaire side of the movement persists, animated by Picasso, and schooled to some extent by Lhote. The main current, however, has found another channel; and, unless I mistake, we are already in the second phase of the movement—a phase in which the revelations of Cézanne and Seurat and the elaborations of their immediate descendants will be modified and revitalized by the pressure and spirit of the great tradition. The leader has already been chosen. Derain is the chief of the new French school—a school destined manifestly to be less cosmopolitan than its predecessor. The tendency towards nationalism everywhere is unmistakeable—a consequence of the war, I suppose. It is useless to deplore the fact or exult in it: one can but accept it as one accepts the weather. Even England has not escaped; and it is to be noted that our best painter, Duncan Grant, a descendant of Cézanne who has run the whole gamut of abstract experiment, is settling down, without of course for a moment denying his master, to exploit the French heritage, with feet planted firmly in the English tradition—the tradition of Gainsborough and Constable. In France, where tradition is so much richer, its weight will confine more closely and drive more intensely the new spirit. One new tendency—that which insists more passionately than ever on order and organization—merely continues the impetus given by Cézanne and received by all his followers; but another, more vague, towards something which I had rather call humanism than humanity, does imply, I think, a definite breach with Cubism and the tenets of the austerer doctrinaires. It is not drama or anecdote or sentiment or symbolism that this would bring back to the plastic arts, but rather that mysterious yet recognizable quality in which the art of Raffael excels—a calm, disinterested, and professional concern with the significance of life as revealed directly in form, a faint desire, perhaps, to touch by a picture, a building, or a simple object of use some curious over-tone of our aesthetic sense. Deep in their quest of that borderland beauty which is common to life and art French painters are once again deeply concerned with life: to borrow an idea from my next essay, they have chosen a new artistic problem. To them, however, "life" does not mean what it means to the sentimentalists or melodramatists, nor even precisely what it meant to the Impressionists. Contemporary French painting has no taste for contemporary actualities. By "life" it understands, not what is going on in the street, but—what to be sure does go on there because it goes on everywhere—the thing that poets used to call "the animating spark." About life, in that sense, the painters of the new generation will, I fancy, have something to say. They will come at it, not by drama or anecdote or symbol, but, as all genuine artists have always come at whatever possessed their imaginations, by plastic expression, or—if you like old-fashioned phrases—by creating significant form. They will seek the vital principle in all sorts of objects and translate it into forms of every kind. That humane beauty after which Derain strives is to be found, I said, in Raffael: it is to be found also in the Parthenon.
I think this preliminary essay should close, as it began, on a note of humility and with an explanation. Twenty years ago, when I was an undergraduate, I remember reading just after it was published M. Camille Mauclair's little book on the Impressionists. Long ago I ceased much to admire M. Mauclair's writing: his theorizing and pseudo-science now strike me as silly, and his judgements seem lacking in perspicacity. But whatever I may think of it now I shall not forget what I owe that book. Even at Cambridge the spirit of the age, which is said to pervade the air like a pestilence, had infected me; and I set out on my first visit to Paris full of curiosity about what was then the contemporary movement—at its last gasp. My guide was M. Mauclair; his book it was that put me in the right way. For by bringing me acquainted with current theories and reputations, and by throwing me into a fever of expectation, he brought my æsthetic sensibilities to that state in which they reacted swiftly and generously to the pictures themselves. This, as I shall explain in another essay, is, to my mind, the proper function of criticism. I shall never forget my first visits to the Caillebotte collection; and in the unforgettable thrill of those first visits M. Mauclair's bad science and erratic judgement counted for something—much perhaps. They put me into a mood of sympathetic expectation; and such a mood is, even for highly sensitive people, often an indispensable preliminary to æsthetic appreciation. There are those who have got to be made to feel something before they can begin to feel for themselves—believe me, they are not the least sensitive or genuine of amateurs: they are only the most honest. I should like very much to do for even one of them what M. Mauclair did for me. It would be delightful to believe that by putting him in the way of the best modern painting and the theories concerning or connected with it—theories which, it seems, for some make it more intelligible—I was giving his sensibility a serviceable jog. Everyone, I know, must see with his own eyes and feel through his own nerves; none can lend another eyes or emotions: nevertheless, one can point and gesticulate and in so doing excite. If I have done that I am content. Twenty years hence, it is to be presumed, those who now read my writings will be saying of them what I was saying of M. Mauclair's. The prospect does not distress me. I am not author enough to be pained by the certainty that in ten years' time this book will be obsolete. Like M. Mauclair's, it will have served its turn; and I make no doubt there will be someone at hand to write another, the same in purpose, and in execution let us hope rather neater.